More about St. Paul

[pecunium]

The RNC has been delayed, but the police presence seems to be more than one might have expected, even looking at the arrests this weekend.

Beginning last night, St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 -- with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies.

That's bad enough (and puts to shame the insult to the body politic of the "Freedom Cage" in Denver).

But listen to this. It's the arrest of Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now. The charge... that previously unused, "conspiracy to commit riot," which was the justification for some of the raids/arrests over the weekend.

What was she doing? Apparently the police decided to detain some of her staff. When she went to talk to the cops, trying to get her people released (or at, I assume, at the very least get some idea what her people were being charged with) they arrested her.

There are more reports that rubber bullets and tear gas are being used.

It ain't Tiananmen, but it ain't the America I grew up in neither.

Comments

[swingland.livejournal.com]

just as a point of reference: did you guys ever do the MOUT city training? i remember in the briefing that during the course of taking a city, casualty levels are expected to be up to 70-75%. i remember a couple years later working as OP-FORCE and the unit that came down into the city suffered near 85% losses. i would love to brag it was because of our super wonder powers, but i think it's more accurately attributable to lack of fire support, no air cover, no grenades. maybe i had my training figures and my real figures messed up. but i swear i remember in the C3 brief (human dimensions to warfare), the S-3 guy doing the briefing was telling us that in the event of urban operations, a fairly large percentage of us were not expected to come back out. maybe it was just the unit i was in and they wanted us to be ready for the worst, or there was some merit to it, or the guy doing the brief made up his statistics. in any case, i apologize for being massively wrong in my understanding.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I've done MOUT (done it at range 13, Cp. Pendleton, even). Casualties are high. But MOUT is artificial. The terrain is limited (the old MOUT range at Ft. Ord was the best I ever saw, multi-storied, with sewers, etc.), the area is small, and the defenders have a much better edge than the 3-1 ratio demanded by doctrine, because the lines of approach are so limited.

At Ft. Ord the attackers took, about 50 percent.

But that's training. People are a lot more aggressive in training, and unit cohesion lasts a lot longer than it does in comabat; when losses mount. The big problem at Ft. Polk (and at Ord, when it was still in business) was comms. The casualties start passing 25 percent and getting reports up, and orders down became a hurdle, which increased casualties.

Looking at unit histories, the numbers for urban combat are higher. They run to 20-30 percent. At which point keeping that unit in the fight stops being useful/productive.